April 1979 was wet. The week leading up to Easter was especially dismal.
I had been in Berry Brothers, the wine shop, for just over a year, building up a group of regular customers: people living in London with a love of wine, who would drop on a weekly basis.
Valerie Eliot, T S Eliot’s widow, was one of my favourites. Every Tuesday, she would appear to collect her regular bottle of Berrys’ London Dry Gin.
The first time I looked after her, I asked for her name. ‘Mrs T S Eliot,’ she said, very deliberately, as I wrote it down in my notebook. She was impressed that I spelt the surname correctly – not too many ls or ts. I hoped she thought this was entirely due to my extensive knowledge of literature. I didn’t mention that my father had taught me that T S Eliot was an anagram of ‘toilets’.
I’d read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at school, and my mother had an old gramophone record of Eliot himself reading The Waste Land. But he had a weird, annoying voice, and I never got past the first lines. And as for Four Quartets – well, there were four of them, for heaven’s sake. Life was short.
I could have spent our time asking the old boy’s widow about it, but Mrs T S Eliot didn’t seem to want to discuss literature. She seemed like a sweet, inoffensive old dear – although I now discover that she was younger than I am now, which is often the way.
I knew that she had been Eliot’s secretary at Faber & Faber when she was in her very early twenties. I knew that Eliot had died in the mid-1960s, when he was 75 and she still in her thirties. I imagined that she had been less of a muse to Eliot and more of a comfort – she once described their evenings at home as ‘playing Scrabble and eating cheese’. But I liked to think that there was more to their relationship – that, at the very least, she understood what the poems were all about.
Mrs Eliot had already granted the rights in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was busy setting the poems to some of his catchy ditties. And we all know what happened next.
On this particular Tuesday, the rain was bucketing down. We finished our chat and I handed over Mrs Eliot’s bottle of gin in a string-handled paper bag. She stood up, and we made for the door.
‘Charge it to my account,’ she said. ‘Of course, Mrs Eliot.’
The weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain was bouncing off the paving stones of St James’s Street. I held the door open. Mrs Eliot buttoned her raincoat, prepared her umbrella, and took the bag.
‘What horrible weather!’ remarked Mrs Eliot.
The opportunity was too good to resist.
‘Well, April is the cruellest month, Mrs Eliot.’
She stared at me blankly. ‘Do you think so?’ she asked. ‘I’ve always disliked February, myself.’
Simon Berry
